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With a school teacher for a mother, my birthright included a love of language and a value of grammar. According to my mother, kids were goats, so we were children. You get the picture. Because I came (later in life) to realize how much I enjoyed tackling the research of a topic for an essay, the way that research unfolded a subject like an emerging butterfly, I knew I wanted to write more, and to do it with knowledge and credentials. In the spring of 2017, I enrolled in a distance-learning Master of Arts in English program at the University of Wyoming. With a cohort of fourteen students, we studied literature, rhetoric, satire, film, and theory for the next three years. An intense hybrid, class convened one week every June on campus, with two semesters each year on Zoom, spending three to three-and-a-half hours each week in our virtual classroom setting. With challenging courses and I being only one of two students in the cohort who doesn’t have an undergraduate English degree, this program brought me to my knees more than once. But in the Spring of 2020 I managed to complete the program with an MA in English.
During my years as editor and publisher of Ceramics: Art and Perception, readers often told me, “There is no critical writing in ceramics,” which became the impetus for my thesis research: “Comparative Analyses of Contemporary Fine Art Criticism and Contemporary Ceramics Criticism.” I went into this topic without a firm grasp or clarity on what actually amounted to critical discourse, or ‘criticism,’ so my methodology would be what clarified that issue for me. I began by reading reviews and articles from various publications, including magazines such as ARTFORUM, Art in America, Sculpture, The New Yorker, Ceramics: Art and Perception, The Journal of Modern Craft, as well as newspapers such as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, to name just a few. As I read each review, I gleaned from the writing what qualities the critic/writer used, color-coding each quality, and leading me to break the subject writing into fourteen qualities. I read later that 2020 Pulitzer Prize awardee and Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight began his career by looking at the writing of The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, his favorite critic. He analyzed the writing for its qualities in order to understand Schjeldahl’s methods. (This knowledge gave me extra confidence in my methodology, after the fact.) The following chart illustrates and explains each of the qualities I gleaned from my reading.
